Let's Talk About LOKI Episode 2 - "The Variant"
By the end of the second episode of Loki, the crap hits the fan, and everything’s thrown into chaos! Loki is on the hunt for another variant of Loki in an effort to help the Time Variance Authority stop this Loki from screwing up the time and killing its agents.
The whole goal of the TVA is to help maintain the proper flow of time, and Agent Mobius is the guy who brings Loki in to help because he figures that this Loki can give them insight into the other Loki's devious plan. By the end of episode two, we meet the other Loki! It’s Lady Loki, played by Sophia Di Martino, and she really makes a mess of things!
Lady Loki "bombs the Sacred Timeline" by sending a bunch of stolen reset charges back to various points in time. This causes all kinds of chaos as the charges seem to restore all of the branches of time that the TVA previously resent to fix things. So she basically unfixes everything! It’s going to be really interesting to see what this does to the MCU. I’m not entirely convinced that the TVA is going to be able to fix this.
It’s not hard to see how this can set up the storylines for Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Lady Loki ends up escaping into a time portal, and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki follows her after a brief conversation where she tells him, "This isn't about you.” Loki is obviously curious and wants to learn more about his female counterpart. As you might expect, Mobius and the other TVA agents aren’t happy with Loki’s decision, but what did they expect? They’re dealing with Loki!
It’s also revealed that Lady Loki knows the location of the Time-Keepers, so there’s a good chance that she might be planning to take them on directly. Who knows, though! Anything can happen at this point! I’m curious to find out what Lady Loki’s motivation is. While she’s being presented as a villain, things might not be so black and white. There may be a grey area here as she fights against the Time-Keepers who are ruling reality and the flow of time with an iron fist.
I did find it interesting that the music playing as she was taking down the TVA agents was Bonnie Tyler's classic 1984 song, “Holding Out for a Hero.” So, could she be the real hero of the story? I can’t wait to find out!
In this episode, Loki goes through the files of his Sacred Timeline self, and he learns of Asgard's destruction in Thor: Ragnarok in which 9,719 Asgardians were killed. Learning this seems to hit Loki hard. But, the file doesn’t offer an update on the survivors who ended up escaping and are now living on Earth. The question is will Loki embrace the Sacred Timeline version of himself, or will he reject it and just go his own way?
We also learn that Owen Wilson’s Mobius has never met the Time-Keepers that he’s employed by. He’s spent his life working for a group of beings he’s never seen. I think it’s safe to say that the story that he’s been told about them is a lie. I don’t think the Time-Keepers are what they say they are. If there are darker things happening behind the curtain, it’s not hard to see Mobius end up fighting against the Time-Keepers, joining Loki’s cause.
It’s funny because Mobius has a fascination with jet skis, and he’s never been able to hop on one and take a ride! By the end of this series I bet we’ll see him riding a jet ski! He explained, "I think a TVA agent showing up on a jet ski on the Sacred Timeline, that would create a branch for sure." But he does acknowledge that it would be "really fun" to try one.
Some of the other Loki variants that we see in the episode include a Tour de France-winning cyclist, a Hellboy-like version of the character, a version that looks like Baphomet, and another wearing armor.
One other thing I want to point out comes from the credits at the end of the series. The Castillian credits for "Variant" list the character as "Sylvie," not Lady Loki or Loki. This could be a reference to the Marvel Comics character named Sylvia Lushton, who received power from the Asgardian god Loki and became Amroa the Enchantress. I’m not sure if this will end up being anything, but we’ll see. In the series Loki is confirmed to be gender-fluid and has also been presented as a woman in Marvel Comics.
What did you all think of the second episode of Loki?
